Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen (November 12, 1866 - March 12, 1925) was a Chinese revolutionary leader and
statesman, the founder of the Kuomintang and the first provisional president
of the Republic of China. In the 1930s he was posthumously given the title
"Father of the Nation", which is currently used in Taiwan. In the
mainland, he is commonly referred to as the "forthgoer" and is
mentioned by name in the preamble to the Constitution of the People's
Republic of China.
He developed a political philosophy known as the Three Principles of the
People.
Names
Full name: Sun Wen
Family name: Sun
Given name: Wen
Courtesy names:
o Yixian
o Deming
Sobriquets:
o Rixin
o The Woodcutter of the Middle Mountain
Mostly known in China as: Sun Zhongshan
Biography
He was born to a peasant family in Cuiheng Village, Xiangshan County
of Guangdong Province, in southern China. The county has been renamed
Zhongshan in his honor.
At age 13 he went to live with an older brother, who had immigrated there as
a laborer and become a prosperous merchant, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Sun studied
at the Iolani School in Honolulu (1879-1882) and ultimately earned a medical
degree in Hong Kong (1892). He subsequently practiced medicine in that city.
His years in the west induced in him a dissatisfaction with the Qing
government of China and he began his political career by attempting to
organize reform groups of Chinese exiles in Hong Kong. In October 1894 he
founded the Xing Zhong Society to unveil the goal of prospering China and as
the platform for future revolutionary activities.
In 1895 a coup he plotted failed, and for the next 16 years Sun was an exile
in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, raising money for his
revolutionary party and bankrolling uprisings in China. In Japan he joined
dissident Chinese groups (later became the Tongmenghui) and soon became
their leader. He was expelled from Japan to the United States.
On October 10, 1911, a military uprising at Wuchang in which Sun had no
direct involvement, began a process that ended five thousand years of
imperial rule in China. When he learned of the successful rebellion against
the Qing emperor from press reports, Sun immediately returned to China from
the United States.
On December 29 at Nanking, a meeting of representatives from provinces
elected Sun as the provisional President of the Republic of China and set
the New Year's Day of 1912 as the first day of the First Year of the Republic.
The official history of the Kuomintang emphasizes Sun's role as the first
provisional President, but many historians now question the importance of
Sun's role in the 1911 revolution and point out that he had no direct role
in the Wuchang uprising and was in fact out of the country at the time. In
this interpretation, his naming as the first provisional President was
precisely because he was a respected but rather unimportant figure and
therefore served as an ideal compromise candidate between the
revolutionaries and the conservative gentry.
After the swearing in, Sun Yat-sen telexed all provinces to elect and send
new senators to establish the National Assembly of the Republic of China.
Then the provisional government organizational guidelines and the
provisional law of the Republic were declared as the basic law of the
country by the Assembly.
The provisional government declared by Sun was in a very weak position. The
provinces of southern China had declared independence from the Qing dynasty,
but most of the northern provinces had not done so. Moreover, the
provisional government did not have military forces of its own, and its
control over elements of the New Army that had mutinied was limited, and
there were still significant forces which had not declared against the Qing.
The major issue before the provisional government was to seek the support of
Yuan Shikai who controlled the Beiyang Army, the military of northern China.
After promising Yuan the presidency of the new Republic, Yuan sided with the
revolution and forced the emperor to abdicate.
Opposition developed to Yuan's dictatorial methods. In 1913 Sun led an
unsuccessful revolt against Yuan, and he was forced to seek asylum in Japan,
where he reorganized the Kuomintang. He returned to China in 1917, and in
1921 he was elected president of a self-proclaimed national government at
Guangzhou in southern China. In 1923, he delivered a speech in which he
proclaimed his Three Principles of the People as the foundation of the
country and the Five Yuan Constitution as the guideline for the political
system and bureaucracy.
To develop the military power needed for the Northern Expedition against the
militarists at Beijing, he established the Whampoa Military Academy (now
Huangpu Military Academy) near Guangzhou, with Chiang Kai-shek as its
commandant and with such party leaders as Wang Ching-wei and Hu Han-min as
political instructors.
In the early 1920s Sun received help from the Comintern for his
reorganization of the Kuomintang as a Leninist Democratic-Centrist Party and
negotiated the First CPC-KMT United Front. In 1924, in order to hasten the
conquest of China, he began a policy of active cooperation with the Chinese
Communists.
By this time Sun was convinced that the only hope for a unified China lay in
a military conquest from his base in the south, followed by a period of
political tutelage that would culminate in the transition to democracy.
On November 10, 1924, Sun traveled north and delivered another speech to
suggest gathering a conference for the Chinese people and the abolition of
all unfair treaties with the Western powers. Two days later, he yet again
traveled to Beijing to discuss the future of the country, despite his
deteriorating health and the ongoing civil war of the warlords.
In March 1925 he died of liver cancer in Beijing at the age of 59.
Legacy
His Political philosophy, known as the Three Principles of the People (????)
was proclaimed in August 1905 and was based strongly on American
progressivism.
In his Methods and Strategies of Establishing the Country completed in 1919,
he suggested using his Three People's Principles to establish ultimate
peace, freedom and equality in the country.
After Sun's death, a power struggle between his young protˇgˇ Chiang
Kai-shek and his old revolutionary comrade Wang Jingwei split the KMT. At
stake in this struggle was the right to lay claim to Sun Yat-senÕs ambiguous
legacy. When the Communists and the Kuomintang split in 1927, marking the
start of the Chinese Civil War, each group claimed to be his true heirs. In
addition, during World War II, both the anti-Japanese government of Chiang
Kai-Shek and the pro-Japanese puppet government of Wang Jingwei claimed to
be the rightful heirs of Sun's legacy.
The official veneration of Sun's memory (especially in the Kuomintang) was a
virtual cult, which centered around his tomb in Nanjing. His widow, the
former Soong Ching-ling, one of the Soong sisters, whom he married in 1914,
sided with the communists during the Chinese Civil War and served from 1949
to 1981 and Vice President (or Vice Chairwoman) of the Communist China and
as Honorary President shortly before her death in 1981.
Sun Yat-sen remains unique among 20th-century Chinese leaders for having a
high reputation both in mainland China and in Taiwan. In Taiwan, he is seen
as the Father of the Republic of China, and his picture is still found in
ceremonial locations such as in front of legislatures and classrooms. Unlike
figures such as Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen played no role in governing
Taiwan, so invoking Sun Yat-sen produces much less of a negative reaction
among supporters of Taiwan independence than invoking other figures of the
Kuomintang.
On the Mainland, Sun is also seen as a Chinese nationalist and
proto-socialist, and is thus highly regarded. In recent years, the
leadership of the Communist Party of China has been increasingly invoking
Sun Yat-sen, partly as a way of improving relations with supports of Chinese
reunification on Taiwan. Significantly, a massive picture of Sun now appears
in Tiananmen Square for May Day while pictures of Karl Marx and Vladimir
Lenin no longer appear.
